I advocate that real estate agents should add everyone to their Facebook personal profile, including friends, family, colleagues (yes other agents), and past/present clients. The bigger your network on Facebook, the greater your ability to grow your sphere of influence and build your business.
Many agents are apprehensive about exposing their clients to the same sort of information as their family and friends. This is where lists and privacy settings come into play. If you have set up your lists then you can control what information people get to see. You can even set things up so that when you post something to your wall or update your status, only a specific set of people do – or don’t – see it.
Let’s say you want friends, but not clients, to see a status update; here is how you would do it (same process applies for anything you post on your wall):
Step 1 On your profile page, select “Status”
Step 2 Click on the “lock” icon
Step 3 Choose “Customize” from the dropdown menu
Step 4 Choose whether you want to make the post visible to only a specific list, or to hide it from one
Step 5 Click on “Save Setting” to make this status update visible to only those people you want
You can also use lists to make more generic privacy changes that apply to your profile:
Step 1 On your profile page, click the “Account” tab
Step 2 Select “Privacy Settings” from the dropdown
Step 3 Select “Customize Settings”
Step 4 Select the privacy setting that you want to manage
Step 5 Click on “Customize” from the drop down menu
Step 6 Choose whether you want to make it visible to only a specific list or to hide it from one
Step 7 Click “Save Setting”
As long as you manage your lists and privacy settings, I don’t think that you or any agent should hesitate to add anyone from their network to their Facebook profile.